A Continental Perspective on Britain's War Myth
As a Dutch person, my relationship with the Second World War isn't one of pride — it's one of absence. When I encounter British war culture, my reaction isn't bemusement. It's something closer to revulsion.
You know, as a Dutch person, my relationship with the Second World War isn’t one of pride. It’s one of absence.
Growing up, the scars of war could be felt in what part of my family I’ve never met, or were not there at all. In the scars my parents carried. In Rotterdam, the city I grew up in, where the center was bombed flat. Well, all of it, except for the two buildings that contained birth records which were left standing so the Germans could identify and hunt Jews.
That is my asociation with WW II.
When I encounter British war culture, the Blitz spirit, the Keep Calm merchandise, the pubs themed around the home front, the constant political invocations of “the spirit that got us through”, my reaction isn’t bemusement. It’s something closer to a sense of revulsion, something visceral and alien to my nature. Not because the British experience wasn’t real, but because the mythology built on top of it has become something unrecognisable from the war my family lived and died through. And more than that: it’s a mythology that I suspect is still doing damage today.
Two wars, one conflict
Britain’s war experience was genuinely different from continental Europe’s, and that difference matters. Britain wasn’t occupied. There were no roundups in British streets. No collaboration government. No neighbours disappearing in the night. The Blitz was devastating, but it was something endured collectively and survived, a narrative of resistance and resilience that could be told cleanly, heroically, without the moral complications that haunted the continent.
The Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, none of us got a clean story. The Dutch resistance narrative, while real, is inflated. The Netherlands had a higher rate of Jewish deportation than France or Belgium. Collaboration was more widespread than the post-war story acknowledged for decades. Coming to terms with that, with the reality that survival often meant silence, complicity, or impossible moral choices, was painful, incomplete, and necessary.
Britain never had to do that work. The narrative of “we stood alone and endured” was broadly true. Just radically incomplete.
What the mythology leaves out
The “stood alone” story erases an extraordinary amount. The Empire contributed massively to the war effort, Indian soldiers, African soldiers, Australian and Canadian forces fought and died in enormous numbers. The war was funded significantly by American lend-lease, which left Britain bankrupt and indebted for decades. The Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million people. Britain’s contribution was real, but it was part of something much larger, not the solo stand the mythology implies.
It also leaves out things that don’t fit the heroic frame. The Bengal famine of 1943, where wartime policy contributed to the deaths of millions. The strategic bombing of German civilians at Dresden and Hamburg. The turning away of Jewish refugees before the war. None of this features in the popular British narrative. It can’t, because the narrative’s power depends on moral clarity, good versus evil, with Britain unambiguously on the side of good.
The mythology as political infrastructure
Every country mythologises its war. The French resistance was partly a story de Gaulle constructed to paper over Vichy. The American “Greatest Generation” narrative smooths over segregated military units and Japanese internment. The Dutch resistance story, as I’ve said, overstates the case. National myth-making is universal.
What makes Britain different isn’t the existence of the myth, it’s that the myth is still actively doing political work eighty years later.
Brexit was argued in Blitz language. “We stood alone before, we can do it again.” COVID lockdowns were framed as wartime endurance. Every national challenge gets filtered through the same template. The tabloid press treats critical examination of the war period as near-treasonous. And a political class that overwhelmingly attended the same small cluster of schools keeps the narrative alive because it serves the broader story of British exceptionalism, a story that justifies not needing Europe, not needing to change, not needing to reckon honestly with what Britain is today versus what it was in 1940.
From a continental European perspective, this is baffling and alarming. The lesson my part of Europe took from the 1940s was that nations need more integration, more mutual commitment, more collective structures to prevent catastrophe. The EU, for all its flaws, is fundamentally a peace project born from the understanding that European nations left to their own nationalist impulses will eventually destroy each other. Britain looked at the same history and drew the opposite conclusion: that it proved Britain didn’t need anyone else.
The gap between identity and reality
Britain today is the world’s sixth-largest economy with genuine strengths, world-class universities, cultural soft power, the English language itself, a globally significant financial centre. But it is also a country where a third of children live in poverty, where junior doctors use food banks, where food bank usage has tripled in a decade, where housing conditions for those on lower incomes are genuinely atrocious, black mould killing children in social housing in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
These realities coexist with a national identity still anchored in wartime greatness. And the identity makes the realities harder to confront, because honest assessment gets coded as defeatism. To say “Britain is a medium-sized economy that needs immigration to sustain its aging population, that benefits enormously from European integration, and that has a serious and worsening poverty problem” is to say something that is simply true. But it clashes so fundamentally with the national self-image that no mainstream politician will say it plainly.
Germany has Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an entire cultural framework for confronting the uncomfortable past. The Netherlands has had its own slow, painful reckoning with wartime collaboration and failure. Britain has no equivalent process, because the dominant mythology says there is nothing uncomfortable to confront. We were the good guys. Full stop.
Why this matters now
I don’t write this to diminish what British people endured during the war. The Blitz was real. The sacrifices were real. The courage was real.
But a story that was once a source of genuine national solidarity has calcified into something that prevents honest engagement with the present. It feeds an exceptionalism that justified Brexit, that frames immigration as invasion rather than economic necessity, that treats European partnership as subordination rather than mutual benefit.
From where I sit, from a country that was occupied, that lost people I would have known, that had its city centre destroyed not as collateral damage but as a tool of genocide, watching Britain cling to its wartime identity feels like watching someone mistake a comforting dream for reality. And the longer the dream persists, the harder the eventual waking will be.
The war my family experienced taught us that nations are fragile, that civilisation is thin, and that we survive by building collective structures stronger than any single country’s pride. Britain’s war taught it that it could stand alone. Eighty years later, it’s still trying. And it’s not working.